Saturday, September 11, 2004

Forgery Proof: Your Own Easy Experiment

It seemed that some of the news coverage tonight on the forged National Guard documents was a bit confused.

I give the major networks kudos for checking out the story (though I'm sure their competitiveness gives them extra incentive for wanting to bring down CBS). But many of the discussions are making this far too complicated. These documents are poor, obvious forgeries. There is no way--no way--these papers were typed in the early 70's.

If you haven't looked at them yet, opensome of the documents. Ask yourself if you've ever seen typewritten documents of any kind that look like this. Ever.

Then do a simple test:

Open up a Microsoft Word document on your computer. Don't do anything to it, just leave the simple default Word settings as they are. Then start at the beginning of a paragraph and start typing sentences from either of these "memos." You'll notice something amazing. The automatic line breaks on your Word document will perfectly match the line breaks in the "memos."

Do you have any idea what the odds are that someone over 30 years ago, using a typewriter, would happen to break every line at the exact same place as the MS Word default setting does it? That the typist would never use an apostrophe and never once break a line at a different place? Do you have any idea what the odds against that are?

Mathematically, it would be conclusive even without all the other evidences of forgery (such as the centered headings, the perfect lines of text, the superscripting, the Times New Roman fonts, etc.)

The silly liberal objections are beside the point, as even the mainstream media seems to understand tonight. Demonstrating that somewhere Times New Roman fonts existed, and that somewhere else there was a rare typewriter that did superscripts, is meaningless. Show us a typewriter that did both in 1972 and that would have conceivably been available to a Texas Air National Guardsman. Show us one machine somewhere that did both--and did automatic line breaks just like Word--and maybe you'll get somewhere.

Because I've got an MS Word processer that does all that by default right now, while all CBS has got is a long-dead guardsman whose family is adamant he didn't write the memos.